Sony released the Vita in Japan in 2011, and about a year later in the USA. It wasn’t an immediate success, with consumers mostly preferring the cheaper cost and larger game library of the 3DS. I didn’t get mine until 2014, by which time it had already stalled commercially.
It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the system, and to this day it remains my favourite of all the Sony consoles. The beautiful OLED screen was ahead of its time, and the ergonomics of the device made it a joy to play even for long periods.
Foremost for me were the games. By this time the Vita had been abandoned by most western developers, and in particular the big-name AAA games were nonexistent on the device. It had become an enthusiasts machine, with a notable abundance of Japanese RPGs, visual novels and quirky indie games. As a big fan of JRPGs I went all-in, and the Vita become my foremost handheld for many years.
The vita was a cartridge based system, and the carts are very similar in size to Switch cartridges. There was no region lock, so you could buy games from any country and they worked fine.
The Vita supported trophies as well – which I enjoyed at the time – and had a robust digital store with lots of available software. It was the first handheld with a seamless online experience which worked well, and certain games were even better with online features.
The screen looks much better than these photos suggest: very bright and high resolution with ink-dark blacks. It was leagues better than the 3DS and to this day remains the best screen on any handheld (excluding phones and the OLED Switch). Even now when I fired it up after five years for a quick play I was very impressed with the screen quality.
In total – including digital games – I have 90 games for the system. Many are shown above, but I also have several collectors editions:
And promos (thanks to AW for these):
Notable games include two Vanillaware games, not the least of which – Dragon’s Crown – is one of my favourite games of all time:
The Vita was also the home of the Toukiden series, which in my opinion is the closest a clone has come to actually beating Monster Hunter. My save files for these three games exceed 500 hours in total:
I’ve also got an abundance of strange ‘girl games’ like these:
I have virtually no memory of even playing some of the above, and the Vita had loads of similar titles. Most are action or RPG games featuring a cast of cute anime girls. Often the gameplay took a backseat to the graphics, and the games were fun enough but hardly memorable.
As mentioned the Vita was regionless, but the majority of good games got a US release, so I didn’t buy too many Japanese games. Notable among my small collection is the Berserk ‘musou’ game which is exceptional and has extremely impressive bullet-hell-like boss fights, which is strange indeed for a 3rd person action game!
I have one Vita game that I never opened. I had already bought and played the game digitally, so when I bought the box set I never bothered opening it.
I also bought the above memory stick when it became clear the systems life was nearing its end. This was late in 2018, and the last game I purchased was in January 2019 during a trip to Japan.
By then the Vita was essentially a retired system. In March 2019 Sony announced they had stopped making the system, and support of the online store was cut back in early 2021. No successor was announced, and with the end of the Vita Sony left the handheld market for good.
While a few of my games are worth more than I paid, on the whole it’s not a system with a great deal of value and I have no plans to sell my collection. I own many great games I’d love to replay, and one day I hope to do just that!